KScope

I know you’ve read the title and are thinking, “Great, I’m going to learn how to write better presentations!” The truth is, it’s about how conferences do call for papers timelines, abstracts, as well as how we manage our content.

I know that right sidebar on my blog has an AWFUL lot of Microsoft events on it. There’s so many, I’ve begun to use the hashtag #MySummerOfSQL due to it. For those of you that follow me with Oracle, it doesn’t mean that I’m leaving the Oracle community- not even close.

What’s the best way to make a presentation on Agile practices? Practice Agile practices.

You could write a presentation “big bang” style, delivering version 1.0 in front of your big audience of 200+ people at Kscope 2011 before anybody has seen it. Of course, if you do it that way, you build a lot of risk into your product. But what else can you do?

You can execute the Agile practices of releasing early and often, allowing the reception of your product to guide its design. Whenever you find an aspect of your product that doesn’t get the enthusiastic reception you had hoped for, you fix it for the next release.

Early this year, my friend Mike Riley from ODTUG asked me to write a little essay in response to the question, “Why Kscope?” that he could post on the ODTUG blog. He agreed that cross-posting would help the group reach more people, so I’ve reproduced my response to that question here. I’ll hope to see you at Kscope11 in Long Beach June 26–30. If you develop applications for Oracle systems, you need to be there.